Indoctrination of the Mean

The rain beat against his face as he stared up at the dark sky. It felt fresh against his cheeks, dripping down his chin. He curled his lip, closed his eyes and felt the darkness surround him, like a warm, desperate blanket.

There was a remedy here. Indoctrinated into his lifestyle, he had become accustomed to the darker reading of the lighter side, but, he softly wondered as he stared up, was there anything darker than this experience, this feeling? He had spent his life examining pathos with a knowledge of his own disconnection from it. It was a life spent examining harsh chemicals with a protective mask, but the mask had been removed and he had become deeply inculcated into the wonderful aroma of death.

The eyes... they held something still, but it was not life. As he looked into them, they held appearance, a glassy look that stared back at him, mocked him. Plasticine embers mocked his mortality. The eyes spoke to him, telling him that they were something more than human, longer lasting, more elemental and yet incommunicable.

In other words, what was left of his love had become transplanted, thrown into the air like dust.

Feeling had always been a source of comfort and pride for him; his sensitivity allowed him to connect with those whose pain had been forgotten. Confusion and distraction were his only enemy, while death and destruction was the enemy of those he attempted to connect together with the fabric of humanity. Yet now, in the singularity of the moment, he understood the need for disconnection, the need for violence.

Falling to my knees I can feel the temperature fluctuate underneath my skin like a thousand broken vesicules the beating a vestigial function of my heart and yet i understand that this this is something that makes me human and i curse it i spit on it fuck it fuck you for dying i hate you i despise you you abandoned me and i cannot no i will not no i should not continue and i can feel gravity hauling me to my knees i can feel you staring at me i can see it when i close my eyes your blank stare your humanity stripped to your flesh your body...

No more hedonism, he told himself, not that he had ever attached to the cause. He knew it as the worship of the flesh, and yet he had seen the purity of flesh... it was not something human, not something that could be described as even animal. What he had stared at inside that casket was a shell, an object devoid of animation, devoid of soul.

Whatever she was, she had not been present.

i was there when you died i could feel you passing through me begging me to push you back into your body by words by poetry this my poetry has failed you...

Many people had written about death before him, and as he held his face in his hands, he knew many would write beyond him. And, he thought, many of the writers whose works had been destroyed, burned by nature's hand or by man's, had written of the subject.

His lips curled and he began to beat the ground, his fists cutting on the hard surface. He swung his fists in blind fury, knowing that he himself signified nothing. And when his fury would not abade, he began to beat himself, biting his lip until it bled, spitting out the blood in the most angry gesture he could muster.

i hate you i hate everything i do not want to be human i want to be an obect i want to be dead in a casket take me ravish me kill me tie me to the bedpost and inject me with your hatred and your will to your own destruction i cannot i will not i can i will please i am not i have no voice anymore except for curses and spitting

Falling forward in exhaustion, he knew he did not mean a word. It wasn't in his mind that he spoke these terms but in his heart, that incredibly inarticulate part of organic life, that vestigial bit of gore inside his chest.

He knew he could not objectify; he had spent his life avoiding exploitation, fighting it in a variety of ways, yet still, the exploitation of entropy had caught him off guard and had taken the one thing he cared about, the one thing that gave his life a logical basis, a wondrous system. It was the control forced upon him that continued his life, dictated all his existence, and now it was the lack thereof that controlled him. He realized that, all his life, he had been fighting against mortality. It was the ultimate fence that surrounded him, that pressed against him, that seeped into his mouth like a ghost, dangling in his mind, taking over his mind. This telekinesis crippled him now, the wounds so fresh.

i will look at this further far away and think to myself how exquisite this day was how much it made me shaped me but now all it does is cut through me and make me bleed tragedy suffering...

He looked up at the sky and wondered softly if he could give his pain away, if he could expand it like a gift, extend his hands while holding it. He wondered if it kept him connected, wondered if it spread his name to where the immortals played. His grief was not for death itself. Grief is never about death. It is a curse on survival.

would you take my pain take every ounce and now i will know i will understand i will see what you see perhaps it is everything perhaps it is nothing perhaps it is cursing me for every mad moment i raised my voice perhaps it is recollection of all my flaws of all my inconsistencies of all my failures and perhaps i would strip myself down away from all those inconsistencies and drag my heart from this hell...

On the ground in front of him was a ragged piece of paper. He looked at it like he had never seen anything before in his life, like he was a newborn babe that was new to this forsaken world. He approached it slowly, like one does a dangerous animal. It was familiar, and yet it seemed so foreign to him. It was a piece of paper he had wrote, probably having fallen out of his pocket. It was a piece of paper that he carried with him wherever he went, and read:

My Love
I write these words not being able,
or careful with them, or simple,
but to speak the unspoken to you.

I cannot speak these in words, but that
you can carry with you I will try.
You are all I see when I close my eyes,
and your kiss shall be with me.
Our vows shall be forever, outlasting
the sun, so that you will never be alone.

He remembered the context, he remembered the attempt, he remembered everything. He even remembered that the piece of paper had smelled like her, not like any perfume she wore, but like HER, in an indescribable aroma. That aroma held life and now it was being washed away, turned to pulp in the rain.

Though words had rarely been written with such love, such honest and deep necessity, all they were to his eyes were curses and spit. Every poem he had ever written, and anything she had ever spoke or wrote back to him, meant nothing, nothing without that touch that is beyond flesh, that animation that is beyond anything the hedonists will ever truly understand... "let them have her flesh," he cursed to himself, "let them have her poems and my poems and let the rain have it all. I want her, her voice, her kiss, her touch, not the touch of her body but the touch that exists beyond it, that leaves her when she dies."

In a year's time, when his eyes began to heal, he began to write, desperately attempting to conjure her. Though he would never succeed in reality, the memories became so engrained that even when he did not realize he was thinking and writing of her, he was writing of her.

It was that way when she was alive as well... memories so engrained they need not be remembered at all.